FISHING RIGHTS, ECOLOGY AND CONSERVATION ALONG SOUTHERN LAKE MALAWI, 1920-1964

Abstract

THIS PAPER DISCUSSES how issues of socio-economic class, race and politics were densely interwoven with the competition for fishing rights, access to land, and fears of ecological degradation along southern Lake Nyasa (now Lake Malawi) from the early 1920s to 1964. It seeks to demonstrate that it was groups of people with access to sources of political and economic power who competed for the lake's environmental resources. Colonial administrators feared that the intensification of this competition would result in over-fishing and ecological degradation along the lake front. The main contenders were traditional leaders, European and Asian (Indian) commercial fishermen and fish traders, a rising group of African 'smallscale' commercial fishertnen and fish traders, and nationalist politicians. The socio-economic characteristics of these groups is worth noting. The traditional leaders, chiefs, village headmen and family heads, were themselves entrepreneurs. They depended on pseudo-traditionalist avenues of accumulation using family labour and their control over 'junior' members of the households and extended families to appropriate the surplus generated by young men. They were usually the owners of fishing gear and controlled the distribution of the catch to the households. l The European and Asian entrepreneurs were a mixture of traders, commercial farmers, and transporters. The capital they invested in fishing and water-based recreational facilities came from these other enterprises. As transporters, owning lorries, they had easy access to fish markets in towns and the plantations of the Shire Highlands. Their lorries were also used to transport passengers and mail between the lake and the urban centres. The African 'small-scale' fishermen and fish traders were predominantly returning labour migrants and petty traders. They invested the proceeds of migrancy and petty trade in nets and bicycles thus often referred to as 'bicycle-boys'. Since the source of their economic power was from non-traditional avenues of accumulation, these entrepreneurs tended to break away from the control of the traditional leaders. As a result, they gradually, but effectively, undermined the position and influence of the traditional leaders in the fishing industry. From the early 1950s, they